ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Graphics Accelerator: New Champion. Page 7

We have long waited for the new dual-GPU ATI graphics cards to come out and finally it happened. Our today’s article should at last determine what strategy turned out more efficient: multi-GPU concept supported by ATI/AMD or a single-GPU concept chosen by Nvidia.

According to our testing methodology, the drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of texture filtering and to minimize the effect of software optimizations used by default by both: AMD/ATI and Nvidia. Also, to ensure maximum image quality, we enabled transparent texture filtering. As a result, our ATI and Nvidia driver settings looked as follows:

ATI Catalyst:

Catalyst A.I.: Standard

Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality

High Quality AF: On

Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off

Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality

Method: Multi-sampling

Temporal Anti-Aliasing: Off

Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

Texture filtering - Quality: High quality

Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: Off

Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off

Vertical sync: Force off

Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On

Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling

Other settings: default

For our tests we used the following games and synthetic benchmarks:

First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2142

Bioshock

Call of Juarez

Call of Duty 4

Crysis

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Third-Person 3D Shooters

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

Tomb Raider: Legend

RPG

Hellgate: London

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Strategies

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

World in Conflict

Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark06

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

We selected the highest possible level of detail in each game using standard tools provided by the game itself from the gaming menu. The games configuration files weren’t modified in any way, because the user doesn’t have to know how to do it. The only exception was Enemy Territory: Quake Wars game where we disabled the built-in fps rate limitation locked at 30fps. Games supporting DirectX 10 were tested in this particular mode.

Besides ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2we have also included the following graphics accelerators to participate in our test session:

Since ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 belongs to the top price range, we expanded the standard set of resolutions with 2560x1600 and 2048x1536, the latter for those games that do not support 16:10 aspect ratio. We used “eye candy” mode everywhere, where it was possible without disabling the HDR/Shader Model 3.0/Shader Model 4.0. Namely, we ran the tests with enabled MSAA 4x antialiasing and anisotropic filtering 16x in all tests except 3DMark. We enabled them from the game’s menu. If this was not possible, we forced them using the appropriate driver settings of ATI Catalyst and Nvidia ForceWare drivers.

Performance was measured with the games’ own tools and the original demos were recorded if possible. Otherwise, the performance was measured manually with Fraps utility version 2.9.1. We measured not only the average speed, but also the minimum speed of the cards where possible.